


Knowing

by JoCarthage



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Drabble, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-11
Updated: 2017-03-11
Packaged: 2018-10-02 18:49:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10224755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoCarthage/pseuds/JoCarthage
Summary: Bucky lay in a sniper's sprawl on the roof of the apartment building opposite Steve's fifth apartment in his third city in three months. He was feeling like a bit of a creeper.





	

Bucky lay in a sniper's sprawl on the roof of the apartment building opposite Steve's fifth apartment in his third city in three months. He was feeling like a bit of a creeper. He was also feeling dirty and the low-key Seattle rain muddying up the grey sideways sunlight wasn't making him feel any cleaner. He raised his eye from the spyglass. Steve was sleeping in the middle of his moving boxes, half-unpacked.

At first, it hadn't been clear why Steve had left Avengers tower. There hadn’t been a big public blowout, but a few months after the Helicarriers had fallen he’d just packed his half-dozen cardboard boxes and headed north in Clint's Honda. He’d driven and driven until he’d hit the 100 mile forest in Maine, and he then kept going.

They'd camped for a while; by "they" he meant Steve had camped and he had sneaked and watched. He knew about keeping watch. He didn’t know much right now, didn’t have what you could call a linear recollection of the past 80 years, but he did have a clear image of protecting his idiot, so he slept in a tree that first night and pretty rough most of the time. He could usually find a vacant apartment to crash in when Steve stuck around long enough, but it was ok. As long as he was protecting.

A blue butterfly thought flitted through his mind that he should go and help pack the boxes; he was sure that Steve wasn't using enough newspaper to wrap his coffee cups. He thought that he'd been the one to move them from one flea-bitten rat-trap apartment to another, at some point in their shared life. He knew how much he needed to use, and where to get it cheap. Used to know. Didn’t know anymore.

But he knew how to follow without being seen. He knew how to get around. He’d tailed him up from Maine, over into Canada, across the continent, and back down the Pacific Coast. He'd bugged his phone, but Steve didn’t seem to use it. He thought it might have been easier if he did, to understand, to get into his head.

Another butterfly thought, red this time: the urge to climb down his fire-escape, up Steve's, pry-open the window, crawl over to Steve and fall asleep in his lap. But that might be--observable. Memorable. 

That was another thought, more of a snake than a butterfly thought, one that hissed in the subbasement of his mind that when he really decided he needed to see Steve, he wouldn’t want to be seen meeting him. He knew he was wanted and it was bad to be wanted. Wanted, not necessarily by the man inside there, but by men affiliated with Hydra; he knew they wanted him.

He set the glass down on the raised lip of the roof, turning to check his phone. His flesh fingers were stiff with cold and slipped on his phone-case, sending it flying across the roof. Cussing, sure Steve's ears would turn red if he spoke the rich mix of Czech and Amharic he was currently using. He was hunching over, checking the screen for cracks, when he heard the tell-tale burr of a $1000 spyglass rolling off a 5-story roof. He was shouting, mixing a bit of Xhosa in, for percussive effect, getting to the edge just as it smashed into the fire-escape and shattering with clanging-bags all the way down the stairs.

Arms mid-wild gesticulation, Bucky froze, looking straight across and into Steve's window. He was awake, head whipping back and forth. Bucky was fixated on Steve's face, knowing exactly what he was hearing at the sudden sound—the shot of guns, the hiss of a soldier’s conversation, the whomp of bombs landing too too too too close. He knew how hard it was to wake up to even the smallest unexpected sound. That's what had made the forest nights so wonderful, in their own sticky, uncomfortable way. He wondered why Steve had taken to staying in cities after the first month, why he'd let himself be woken-up over and over by back-firing cars and thunder-storms.

Bucky knew he'd slept through a whole night, at some point in his unremembered life. Well, he didn't know for sure. But he had a vague feeling he had and that might had something to do with the man who was standing now, staring at him through the window. Bucky held still, rain trickling down the back of his collar, soaking his hair, hands falling to a neutral position at his sides.

“Bucky,” Steve mouthed, voice quiet to even a supersoldier's ears across the distance of an evening rush-hour street. And he nodded, because yes, that was his name. Or, if he averaged all of his memories, that was the most common name. It wasn’t the worst he'd been called, nor the best. It was a stitched-together version of who he'd thought he might be.

Steve had stepped towards the window, hand raising. He pressed it against the glass, and Bucky found himself mirroring him, stepping closer to the edge of his roof with the fire-escape below. His fingers curled; some kind of beckoning, a known greeting? Bucky did the same, his fingers curling against his flesh palm. Steve spoke, voice low, but audible through the thin glass.

“Please, please stay there. I will be right there, please, Bucky, please,”

And Steve was running to the door on the other side of the apartment, throwing the bolt and yanking it back, sprinting towards the downstairs door and the wall of rain dividing them. Bucky could imagine his stocking feet slipping on the hardwood floor, and other futures flitted through his mind: he could fade away; he could fight; he could run to meet him in the middle of the street; he could fall on his knees, sobbing, begging to be taken back.  
  
None of those seemed right, so he let himself become a statue, unaffected by the cold or rain or the writhing nest of emotions those fluttering butterflies had turned into inside of him. He froze himself like he had never let the cryotubes freeze him; he tried to get that thought out of his head, but it was basilisk of a thought, petrifying, lithifying. He stilled himself, until even his breathing seemed like an intrusion  

But that stillness could not hold. Maybe those monsters were trying to get out, get free of his frozen self, but he shaking himself out of his skin by the time Steve got to the last level of the fire-escape.

Steve leapt over the lip of the roof and then paused, standing with his hands up. Bucky's shaking got harder, the thought that Steve might want to embrace him, that the basilisk might freeze him too, was ricocheting across his body, the terror and want of it smashing against each other inside of him. Steve's face—it was like he was broken in half.

“Why are you here?” Bucky heard himself say, flat; flat affect; flat asset. It was an old joke, though not one he'd ever made for himself. Steve spoke fast, like every word might be his last.

“I thought you might come here, if I was here. I thought you wouldn't come--visit--see me if I was in Avenger's tower, and then eventually I realized that if I was sleeping outside, you might have-to too and while I like camping you never did, said it was for rich people who didn't have to sleep with bugs every night whether they wanted to or not." He took a breath--if Bucky leapt forward right now, he would be in his arms in a single movement. He didn't move, trying to hold the basilisks back.

"Buck, I can't—I don’t want to be out there and not know where you are." He lowered his hands, flexing them into fists and then loose again, like he was trying to look non-threatening; Bucky had never even thought to feel threatened. He wavered towards him and Steve took a step forward: 

"You don’t have—I don’t have any—look, please come inside." He made a gesture behind himself, to the apartment, half-filled with half-filled boxes. 

"I have the lease for a few more days--I can extend it even, if you like, if you like it here. We can talk, or not talk, I have food, and money, and there’s only one bed but there’s blankets and I’ll pull out the couch cushions and—“

And Steve's face fell apart and he stumbled, gasping, a low sound of pain as he got overwhelmed, body going slack and Bucky surged forward, arms going up and under Steve's. 

“Steve, I’ve got you. Steve, it’s okay,” and Steve was the one sobbing, he was falling apart in his arms, voice still going, muffled in the wet leather of Bucky's jacket:

“You should hate me, not hold me; I don’t know why you--if you’re here to kill me--I get that." His voice was flat too, flat affect, flat asset, and that wouldn't do. Nothing about that was ok. Bucky knelt to the ground with him, trying to get their eyes level, trying to figure out how to say whatever needed saying to get his sunlight back.

Steve was still talking: "Bucky, Bucky, I am so fucking sorry. I let you go, and I didn’t mean to—I would have walked over every one of those glaciers barefoot if I had known I could find you in one of them." He said, voice cracking, hands coming up to his face. Bucky expected him to shake him, but he didn't; his hands were soft as butterflies' wings. 

"Bucky _please_ ,” and Steve lost his words too, nothing but the motions of his hands on the other hair, face, shoulders, still light, barely there but each touch like fire.

Bucky's grip was was like stone, but not killing stone; the kind of stone that holds up mountains. He held up Steve, arms under his, like he was carrying him from a battlefield, like he was finally--finally--finally getting him to safety. He felt the warmth of Steve forcing its way through his soaking black jacket, soaking black shirt, soaking undershirt, to his cold flesh and icy metal arm.

A butterfly thought came through and it was the blue of Steve's eyes: Bucky knew the words now.

"I'll stay." The thought came to Bucky gently now, rising up through his strata, that was another use for stone: building houses. And with those words, Bucky knew, knew as deep as he'd ever been cold and with detail finer than any butterfly's wing: Bucky was home.


End file.
